A couple of days ago I clicked on the StumbleUpon toolbar and landed on this incredible photo of lenticular clouds over Mt. Rainer at APOD. It was a bit unnerving, because that picture has been my desktop wallpaper for the past year or so! Good call, though.
Category: Life
Comic-Con Coffee Quest
The first year we stayed in town for Comic-Con, we walked past an It’s a Grind coffee shop every morning on the way to the Little Italy trolley stop. Since then, we’ve always tried to fit in at least one visit to either that shop or the one Downtown across the street from Ralphs. (Sure, they’ve opened a store near home since then, but it’s sort of a tradition.)
I never quite made it this year, though I came close on Saturday before lunch.
I ended up walking by a coffee stand set up outside Lion Coffee. Two years ago, the site had been a Starbucks, before the chain started mass-closing their stores. (Now they’re only on every other corner.) Last year, Lion was in the process of converting this location, but hadn’t actually opened yet. Shrewdly, they had set up a table outside, selling coffee from urns and drinks from a cooler.
This year, they were open, but had set up a table around the corner to catch people walking by. It worked. They didn’t have any iced coffee outside, but the clerk handed me a dollar-off coupon for asking, and I ended up getting a really good iced mocha inside!
Are You Sure it’s Fake? (Overheard at the Fair)
Overheard at the fair last night:
“Are you sure that’s fake?”
“Yes, I just touched it. It’s plastic.”
Links! Alarms, Ghosts of History, Firefly Trek, WW2 Star Wars & More
Serious stuff (news, usability, history, etc.):
- Too many alarms can be as bad as none, if people learn to ignore them. Aesop knew it, but modern society keeps forgetting. (NY Times via NN Group)
- Then and now: Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov blends World War II photos with images of the same locations today. I’m a member of a Flickr group that does this with more general timeframes, Looking Into the Past, though I’ve only contributed one myself. It blends the 1997 and 2007 views of the UCI Student Center.
- The Internet Storm Center offers tips on protecting computers from lightning.
And not so serious:
- Fantastic image: Firefly crew as the Enterprise crew. Classic Star Trek, of course. One thing that really struck me was the reminder that there’s really only one woman among the regular classic Trek cast: Uhura. Nurse Chapel and Yeoman Rand are there, but neither of them would really have had the kind of focus that Kaylee, Zoe, Inara and River have here.
- Incredible custom action figure maker Sillof collaborated with Glorbes on a Star Wars in World War II series.
- The webcomic SMBC presents: The Logogeneplex! I’m pretty sure I’ve read stuff that this was used on. (Warning: archives are NSFW.)
Comic-Con 2010: The Gaslamp Crush
The plaza near the Gaslamp Trolley station, 5th Street and L, bracketed by the Omni, Hard Rock Hotel, and Hilton Gaslamp, has become the main hub of off-site Comic-Con activity over the last few years. It’s the most direct route between the convention center and Downtown San Diego. Unlike the crossing at 1st, there’s enough space to set up displays and businesses willing to undergo a SyFy makeover…so they can set up the Green Hornet Car (and the Green Hornet girls), the Cafe Diem, and the Scott Pilgrim Experience (with free garlic bread!). The city has started blocking off the area to cars to make room for pedestrian traffic, but since people still need to cross two trolley lines, a railroad, and a street, the crowds are a captive audience.
As a result, the place is packed not just with people attending the con, but also with promoters handing out flyers, postcards, temporary tattoos, comic books and goodie bags. The Beat describes it as the “heart” of the con, or possibly some less savory body part. It’s sort of like walking down the Las Vegas strip, only instead of sketchy-looking men handing you trading cards* with pictures of hot women and phone numbers, there are hot women handing you cards with pictures of spaceships and sketchy-looking men with website addresses.
Well, mostly. One promoter shoved a movie postcard and a condom packet into my hand with the URL of what I hope was a viral marketing website slapped onto it.
Stay classy, San Diego!
And then there are the people there not to give you stuff, but to be advertising. The ones in promotional costumes, like the Fandango paper-bag puppets or the Chik-Fil-A super-hero cows. Zombies promoting The Walking Dead.
This year, a new group joined in: those who weren’t really here for the convention, but just wanted to get the attention of a large number of people: Vegan activists. The “God Hates Everyone But Me” scumbags. (The con crowd fired back with a creative counter-protest.)
I never could figure out whether the man with the “CIA Is Evil!” sign was serious, or part of the same viral marketing campaign that had a legion of Men in Black handing out “confidential” envelopes to everyone who walked by.
»Full index of Comic-Con posts and photos.
*Go ahead. Tell me they don’t look like stripper trading cards. Though I remember some webcomic where the cast decided to use them for a collectible card game a la Magic: The Gathering.
Links: Identity, Kindle, Language, and the Moon
Fanboy Scouts has launched a series of Merit Badges for Geeks including achievements for Speedster, Mt. Doom, Tie Fighter Pilot, Away Team, and more.- Privacy in terms of contextual identity. How you present yourself to your friends is not how you present yourself to your colleagues, and what you’re willing to share in each context is going to be different.
- XKCD is probably right about the future of “old-timey” speech. “Forsooth, do you grok my jive, me hearties?” We have a hard enough time getting the mid-twentieth century right, and that’s with people around who lived it!
- Darryl Cunningham debunks the Moon Hoax in comic-strip form.
- The new Kindle looks nice. They’re starting to get to the price/feature/polish point where I’d be tempted. (Well, except for that pesky DRM…) Also, Amazon launched Kindle for Android recently, but I haven’t tried it out. While it will run on Android 1.6, it’s a bit big for my G1 unless I clear out some other apps.
Arcadia & Orange Moon Over LA
Saturday night we went out to see a production of Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia at the Sierra Madre Playhouse. If you’re not familiar with the show, it’s a comedy about love, sex, math, history and the pursuit of knowledge. The show follows two main stories: the lives of a student and her tutor during an 1809 visit by Lord Byron to her family’s estate, and the present-day efforts of two historians to figure out just what happened during that visit. (One of them gets it spectacularly wrong.) It was a good production, though I got the impression that the actor playing Bernard was trying to channel Ricky Gervais.
Beforehand we had dinner at The Novel Cafe in Pasadena. Afterward we went looking for someplace where we could grab dessert or coffee, but Sierra Madre had pretty much closed down for the night from what we could see. Solution: a bottle of water, a soda, and a bag of cookies from the grocery store.
About that orange moon.
Along the way back, I dithered over taking the 605 or the 57 until literally the last moment, and decided to take the 605. Less than a minute later, I looked out the window to the right and saw…
…a deep orange half-moon just above the horizon, sitting tilted with the curve facing downward to the right. Just below it were towers of lights, almost certainly the distant skyline of downtown Los Angeles. The lower end of the moon was just starting to flatten out as we lost the view.
If I’d gone the other way with that 50/50 decision, or if we hadn’t taken the time to look for dessert or coffee, we would have missed that view.